


Closest to Heaven

by Midsommers



Series: From the Breakwater [1]
Category: B.A.P, The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe, Brotp, F/M, Freeform, Gen, Magical Realism, O.C. - Freeform, OT6, Other, brotp6, everyone is named differently, mostly - Freeform, you can figure out who is who
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-09
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-11-12 04:10:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11153970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Midsommers/pseuds/Midsommers
Summary: When you grow up on the island, you grow up in the shadow of the November sea. Cold, calling, wild, unforgiving. Home.





	Closest to Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> Scorpio Races credit to Maggie Stiefvater  
> Title : Prompt 193 from Inkstay's 500 prompt challenge
> 
> Thisby is a "tiny island in the middle of [N]owhere... a rocky little bit of a place that looked a lot like..." (Stiefvater, 2011).

The _capaill uisce_ are not gods even though some people treat them that way. They come from the sea and are monsters and devils and the story behind the scars on his late grandfather’s arm. 

 

He breathes through his nose, inhaling the scent of the garage -- leather and rust and gasoline, diesel, grease and metal, like the spell his grandmother said she wove through the bracelets for he and his siblings every Racing season: sky and water and blood. Love, luck and courage.

 

But one by one, the Bang's have all moved back to the mainland, just as years and years ago they came one by one to this island far from anywhere. Left until it’s only he and his brother and his grandmother, and his sister. His sister who "won’t make it back for Racing season but will be back for Christmas".

 

He breathes away the tension in his shoulders when he remembers that her time here is also drawing to a close. The island never held for her the same pull it does for him and she’s met someone on the mainland. Someone who thinks their island is small and backwards and superstitious. She brought him home last racing season.

 

Grandmother says people see what they want to (and he had, the fool: seeing blood on the sand, thinking, only that no one had been trampled too badly). 

 

It’s an old reassurance. She gives it in her voice creaking like the hinges of their old house now that Grandfather isn’t here to. His voice like flint rubbing stones, quick in all the right places, slow and measured in all the others and just as right, gone. He supposes there must be something he’s not seeing because Natalie has never been a fool. She has island steel and salt-water wind in her just like the rest of them. But she’s still, one day, not going to come back.

 

He screws the cap back onto the engine overflow with a viciousness he instantly regrets. Maybe, he thinks, he will understand after this year. 

 

Yongnam clatters in, waving clumsily with a paper bag in one hand, coffee in the other and a second bag in between his teeth. It draws out a brief smile from him before his brother ducks into the office to talk with their boss.

 

Yongnam doesn’t like the shop the way he does, or maybe he just likes it too much. It's just too easy to lose himself among over-run air conditioners and rusting carburetors. Crack a quiet joke that makes Jongup laugh like a surprise. But that timeless familiarity can just as easily turn stifling, wine turned to vinegar. Those days, he can never quite understand Yongnam's easy smiles. But understands all to well the heaviness in his eyes.

 

He looks at the bracelet on his wrist, red and blue and green, love and luck and courage.

 

He feels a stab of guilt.

 

His parents had not called this year. his mother had not pleaded through the phone with Grandfather to stop filling her boy’s heads with stories of sand and blood and glory and rushing wind. This is what she thinks she has left behind. 

 

This is the kind of thought that is unbearable for her and has been slowly driving the Bang family from the island.

 

His father had not made him and his brother promise, making sure Grandfather was within clear hearing range, not to go to the beaches once the _capaill_ begin rising from the waves. Not until race day. This year there is no promise to break.

 

**  


 

Today he thinks the truth is that he hates the garage, and the slaughterhouse, he thinks, perhaps particularly the slaughterhouse, sluicing blood from his white rubber gloves with the hose. The first _capall_ was spotted yesterday night and orders for meat have been coming in from any young man brave or foolish enough to try his luck at capturing one. This means more work for him, more money to put in the battered tin on their mantle.

 

Yesterday evening, Grandmother had tied the braided ribbon around their wrists: red and blue and green, red and white and grey. He wonders a little at her choice this year. Every year she has woven different colors for the two of them. He thinks Yongnam's would have suited him better. Given that he’s the one that dresses like a washed out version of his older brother, in blacks and greys. And whites, when he can get away with it.

 

He still stinks of the slaughterhouse, iron and a certain kind of suffering, and he hates it but takes a turn to the cliffs above the most popular beach anyways.

 

It’s probably stupid. Years and years of his parents cautioning about this one things, even if they have been absent more often than not, has made him cautious and maybe a little irrational. He presses his lips together against a wry, private smile at the thought that the kind of luck they think he has means a _capall_ will leave the waves and come to the cliffs because he smells like the buckets the men on the beach carry to tempt the beasts.

 

The walk feels long as the shadows stretching to the east and the south-blowing chill lifts the remaining sweat from his temples. He plays with a long-worn hole in the pocket lining of his jacket. The hole swallows his index finger and spits it back out again. Loose threads tickle his fingers. Crumbling wind-worn stone shifts under his scuffed trainers when he leans against the lone blasted _tsuga _. Its roots tangle deep into the cliff and offer some illusion of concealment from the shouting surging figures on the beach bellow. The sand, yellow-gold in the leaning-sun light, is churned from hooves. It's barely into the season, but those with _capaill_ caught in times before, appear to be taking advantage of the relative peace before new blood comes to tempt fate on the water. He holds his breath counting _one, two, ten _on a small rider on a brown mount, a man in a dim green slicker throwing himself out of their way. You can almost hear the _capall's _teeth snap together.______

_____ _

 

_____ _

But the wind turns and a brindled _capall_ with jutting withers flairs her nostrils. He remembers he smells like blood and iron and pushes off, hands back in his pockets, before she can find him with her sea-worn eyes.

_____ _

 

_____ _

He thinks they might be right about his luck when he comes across her and the quiet cove only two thirds of the beach-way to their house. Afterwards, he will remember this beach is right next to the one where his grandfather caught the _capall_ that tore his arm and won him his race. But now, he watches a girl. The island is small, the town is smaller, and he knows she isn’t the daughter of some tourist or investor. 

_____ _

 

_____ _

He should. Her family history has been a point of gossip since he was a boy.

_____ _

 

_____ _

Her father was first generation island-born. Son of outsiders, possessed of a boisterous attitude and a friendly smile, gone to the mainland and came back, somehow drawn to the island and the magic that lingered here and his inheritance. Two garages -- one that rented and catered and repaired local and tourist vehicles alike, the other where Yongguk worked.

_____ _

 

_____ _

Her mother had not come from the island. She had showed up three years after her future husband to teach and overturn the curriculum in the island school system and married shortly after, staying where most chose to leave. His parents had nothing bad to say about either of them, just that they preferred to keep to themselves. Their daughter was younger than him and they'd barely had any contact between them before some meddling by her maternal grandparents sent her away for the last few years of her schooling. He hadn’t known she was back.

_____ _

 

_____ _

It's old _ajumma _gossip. He doesn't know why he remembers it.__

_______ _ _ _

 

_______ _ _ _

The sea was quiet but had a sense he ignored in favor of watching the girl. She stood at the seaside as if she was waiting but when she saw him watching, ducked quickly out of sight. By the time he had climbed down the cliffs she was already gone, sprinting away up the hills. He stood there for a long time until he had the distinct feeling of being watched. The woven threads around his wrist, red and blue and green, love and luck and courage, sparked as if with static. 

_______ _ _ _

 

_______ _ _ _

The _capall_ was still more _uisce_ than horse -- slitted ears, nostrils red and flared. His heart beat faster and faster as the _capall_ looked at him and then away, past him.

_______ _ _ _

 

_______ _ _ _

He felt himself moving forward without thinking, shifting one foot in front of the other. Until the _capall_ gave a shrill scream that chilled him to the bone.

_______ _ _ _

 

_______ _ _ _

He remembered the thin string braided around his wrist and his grandmother’s warnings, his grandfather’s old old tales, the smell of blood on his skin and turned, slipped rapidly back up the beach, with the shifting grains of sand blown by the wind, the _uisce’s_ cries echoing through the dunes, sliding over his skin like December rain all the way home.

_______ _ _ _

**Author's Note:**

> As mid autumn approaches, the sea grows rougher, a product of the region’s climate that all but isolates the island in the winter. It is a continuous problem, approached communally by island natives who stockpile food, water, and building materials to wait out the months. Its location keeps the island’s weather similar to that of the Central and Southern UK, so snow is rarely an issue, but the courthouse keeps track of damages, caused mostly by mild flooding, high winds, or a particular type of storm called the _uisce gaoth_... (Man, _From the Deep _, 20xx)__
> 
> ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ _
> 
> __The world keeps telling me I must start adulting and everything I do puts another story rattling into my head. Help_ _


End file.
